From the back of the box: "You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner."

 

"But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn't be proud, but your grandparents would be delighted."

This description doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with the game, its merely the ‘theme’ that is tacked upon the game.  Not a bad thing or theme, but still tacked on.  What Dominion is REALLY is essentially a CCG without the card collecting. This is a game that centers about the deck building that you find in popular CCG such as the Magic:The Gathering (the grand daddy of them all).  Now you might wonder, how can a game about deck building be fun? What I am going to do in this review is answer that as its one of my favourite games in my collection!

 

 

The theme of Dominion has been loosely tacked upon the game (as stated above). The theme is medival/mythical deck building (there are witches after all).  It could been themed as anything, but this is approachable, relatable and fun.

 

 

The goal of Dominion is to construct a deck, that at game end, is worth the most victory points. During the course of the game you ‘buy’ cards to add to your deck, some are worth victory points, others provide you actions or options. The game is really about finding the balance between these two things.

 

 

So what do you get in the box? A WHOLE WACK OF CARDS. That is it. Yup. A ton of cards, 500 in fact! 

500 Cards:

130 Basic Treasure Cards:

60 "Copper" Cards

40 "Silver" Cards

30 "Gold" Cards

48 Basic Victory Cards:

24 "Estate" Cards

12 "Duchy" Cards

12 "Province" Cards

252 Kingdom Cards:

240 Kingdom Action Cards (10 x 24 Each)

12 Kingdom Victory Cards (12 x 1 "Gardens")

30 Curse Cards

33 Placeholder Cards

7 Blank Cards

Storage Tray

Rulebook

 

Each card has a nice finish with adequate artwork. Nothing to really right home about, but the text of each card is readable and easy to understand.  I highly recommend picking up some sleaves to increase the life span of your cards.

 

Its actually a rather large box for only 500 cards, but why size? Its due to the most useful storage tray that I have ever received from a box! Unlike FFG (fantasy flight games) whom are notorious for ‘coffin boxes’, Dominions insert is a think of art and beauty! Combined with a labelling insert that you can download (and all new versions of the game come with), all your cards will be neatly stowed away for easy access after each game. This makes for quick set up and take down between rounds. Believe me, its one of the things that they really did right with this game! 

 

 

Dominion centers around deck building. It’s a game about card drafting and hand management. Each hand tends to play itself (in most cases), its just a matter of making the optimal choice each turn and selecting the right ratio of cards to have in your deck.

 

 

So how does this game work? I keep saying ‘it’s a game about deck building’, so here is how you go about building your deck :) 

 

Each players turn is divided into 3 phases:

1) Action Phase – play an action or attack card

2) Buy Phase – buy and add cards to your deck

3) Clean Up Phase – discard the remainder of the cards un-played from your hand as with those played and draw 5 more

 

Simple enough right?

 

Each game of dominion starts with selecting at random 10 community cards known as Kingdom cads, each having a set of 10 each (8 in two player games). The base game of Dominion comes with 25 sets of these Kingdom cards which really are the heart of the game.  You only ever play with 10 of these cards in any given game. The game provides a nice set of special cards (one of each) to use at the beginning of each game to allow you to randomly shuffle and draw the subset of 10 (of the 25) cards to play with each game, just another nice touch!  

 

Think about this though, that is 25 pick 10 cards. That is 3268760 combinations! Crazy huh? Talk about replay-ability!

 

There are two other types of cards, Treasure and Victory. Treasure cards is the games money in denominations of copper (valued at 1 coin), silver (valued at 2 coins) and gold (valued at 3 coins). Victory cards are represented as pieces of ‘land’; Estate (1 victory point), Duchy (3 victory points) and Province (6 victory points).

 

 

Each player begins the game with the same starting deck of 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards. Thus your first two turns (of 5 card hands), will be a split between the 7 copper you start with.  Whenever you run out of cards to draw, simply reshuffle your discard pile to form a new deck to draw from. Trust me, you will be doing a lot of reshuffling in this game. I recommend that after a player completes the first two phases of the turn, move onto the next while that player cleans up (and shuffles) his deck (if need be).

 

In phase 1, the Action phase, you can play any 1 action card that you have available in your hand. One card at a time? When I have 5? That seems silly, but wait! There is more! Many of the Kingdom cards are +X action cards! So if you play a +2 action Kingdom card, you now can play another two cards from your hand! Neat huh? Each of the kingdom cards have some sort of benefit such as +X Actions, +X Buy actions, + Coins, some allow you to trade for more expensive cards, some allow you to ‘attack’ other players to affect their game play and others allow you to draw more cards.

 

The second phase is the Buy phase. If you haven’t figured it out already, this is the point where you can buy more Treasure, Victory or Kingdom cards to expand your deck. Each card in Dominion has a different coin cost, the most expensive of which is the province card at 8.  Most Kingdom cards range from 2 to 6 in value.  When you buy a card, it goes right into your discard pile to be shuffled into your deck when your current one depletes (don’t worry, you burn through your deck fast!).  Now what do you Buy cards with? Why your Treasure cards of course! You play your Treasure cards at this point to increase your coin amount for that turn. An important strategy in any game of Dominion is to enhance the Treasure cards available to you in your deck. As you are only ever drawing 5 cards a turn (+ whatever you draw from played Kingdom cards), the higher the value Treasure cards that you draw the better.

 

The magic numbers in Dominion I find are 5 and 8. 5 to buy the ‘really’ good Kingdom cards and 8 to buy provinces, the best Victory card. If you ever draw a hand where you get to 8 coin, BUY A PROVINCE. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS BUY A PROVINCE! 

 

The final phase of Dominion is the Clean up phase. At this point you discard all that you have played, all cards that are unplayed in your hand (like victory cards) and then draw another 5 new cards from your deck (reshuffling if you run out).

 

The game ends on one of two conditions: 

1) 3 stacks of Victory, Treasure or Kingdom cards are depleted

2) All the Province cards have been purchased

 

The key to Dominion is finding good combinations of Kingdom cards and balancing that with the number of victory cards that you buy. Often during a game, someone will flood their deck with useless cards or too many Victory cards early and this will really stall their deck for late game. Its important that your deck grows in a balanced manner.  As you buy more of any one card, you change the balance of your deck, you changes the odds of certain cards being drawn and drawn together (to get combos).  This is the real challenge in Dominion.

 

 

 

This game is very simple. Play and buy cards, shuffle up and play and buy some more. What is really enjoyable about this game is learning and figuring out what cards work well together and in what situation.  I strongly recommend NOT reading any strategies about Dominion. This will really ruin the game as half the fun is discovering what works well together and experimenting!

 

The only thing that I will say about Dominion is that there is one card that is exceptionally broken, the Chapel. If used in what is know as a ‘Chapel Deck’, its is exceedingly difficult to defeat that player. The Chapel allows you to discard up to 4 cards from your hand. You might wonder why this would be a problem? Think of it this way, on your first few turns your discard your 3 dead estate cards and excess copper. Now every hand your are either drawing 4 or 5 copper. Buy some silver and discard some more copper. Buy some gold with that silver and discard the rest of your copper and silver. Now with that much gold in your hand along with a few good Kingdom cards, you can rush off to buy all the Province cards w/o a single person having a chance at winning.  Its just too powerful for what it is.

 

The only other issue with Dominion is that the game favours the first player seat. That is why they suggest playing ‘rounds’ of Dominion, rotating this position from game to game.

 

This game has extremely high replay-ability. You will find yourself coming back again and again as each game is different with a different set of 10 cards. Get bored of the base game? Buy one of the two expansions to switch things up!

 

 

3/3 For Rules and Game play

2/3 For quality of components (still seems a bit pricey for what you get, but still well worth it due to high replayability)

4/4 For Fun Factor and Replayability

 

That is a solid 9/10. I want to give it a 10, but its still just a box of cards. I have problems with that :)

 

 

This is a must buy. Simply a great game that is exceptionally approachable, easy to learn and plays fast. In one night of gaming will get through a half dozen games, which is good since we never have more than a couple of hours to game at any given time.  It might seem pricey for a box of cards, but they have been exceptionally well play tested and will provide countless hours of fun!

 

 

Napoleon’s Triumph is a unique and deep wargame with outstanding production values, dice less combat, and many other unique mechanics.  It’s playable in an evening, and best of all, the game does a great job of focusing your attention on what I consider the most important element of a successful wargame: maneuver.

 

 

Anyone who is familiar with Bowen Simmons first game Bonaparte at Marengo (hereafter “BaM”) will know that Bowen produces games with outstanding components, particularly relative to standard wargame components.  No paper maps and thin cardboard chits here.  And in Napoleon’s Triumph (hereafter “NT”), the components outshine even Bowen’s early effort.

 

Like BaM, NT includes long thin wooden blocks which serves to make a game in progress look like an old fashioned battle map.  NT, though, includes two fully mounted maps and adds metal commander pieces that BaM lacked.  A nice touch is that Bowen included two copies of the rules in both games, but in NT, unlike BaM, they are full color.

 

Suffice it to say that even a eurogamer will be happy with the components in NT.

 

 

 

 

The rules in NT are only 10 pages long, but that is a bit deceiving because they are exceedingly concise, to the point that it is rather difficult to grasp all the implications of what you’ve read.  There is an annotated copy of the rules available on Boardgamegeek that I recommend a first time player seek out; they add a lot of commentary that makes the concepts in NT clearer.  

 

Even with annotated rules, though, be prepared to struggle a bit through your first game.  It’s not that the game is complex, but it is so unlike anything else that it will take a while for the mechanics to sink in. Players of BaM will have something of a headstart, but there are still a large number of changes, and only the most basic concepts remain the same.  Another factor to be aware of is that combat is very process heavy.  Included in the annotated rules is a two page flow chart of how combat works, and I found myself referring to it for every combat in my first game.  Once the mechanics are internalized, though, this can be dispensed with.

 

In terms of complexity, this game is low-moderate by wargame standards, and high but other game standards.  Target audience is aged 12+.

 

 

1) Blocks

 

One of the most obvious and important mechanics in NT is that it is a block game.  As can be seen, the blocks are not the normal rectangle normally found in block wargames, instead these are long and thin.  As such they better invoke the feeling of an old battlefield, but they lose the ability to be used as a step reduction mechanism.  In most block wargames, there is a unique strength for the unit on each edge of the block.  By rotating it as it takes damage, blocks allow for a simple way to implement a four step reduction system.  In NT, by contrast, you indicate that a unit has taken a hit by removing it and replacing with a block of a lower value.

 

The long blocks, though, retain their ability to implement a “fog of war” aspect to the game by hiding a unit’s strength until in engages in combat.  In NT, this attribute is extremely important since combat is entirely deterministic with no random variables.

 

2) Dice less combat  

 

One of the most unique aspects of NT is that combat is not random at all, except to the extent that you may not know the strength of your opposition when the battle begins.  Instead, combat comes down to a simple strength comparison, with the stronger unit winning.  Of course, it’s a bit more involved than that, with strength modifiers based on terrain, units types (of which there are four types: infantry, elite infantry (i.e. the famous Imperial Guard) cavalry, and artillery.

 

 

 

One of the things that requires getting used to is that head-on assaults rarely work.  If you throw your corps into a defended position, you’ll find yourself with your men streaming to the rear in complete disorder, with the corps near useless for several turns.

 

Instead, you have to work, often for several turns, to undermine a defensive position with artillery bombardment, feints, and flank attacks.  This is one of the things I like most about the game, and I’ll take more about it a bit later when I share my game play impressions.

 

3) The map

 

Another interesting aspect of the game is the map.  It is essentially an area movement map where the terrain is divided into irregular polygons, whose size and shape is determined by the underlying terrain.  For example, in congested areas such as towns, hills, and light woods, the areas are smaller, meaning it takes longer for units to move versus open areas where the polygons are larger. 

 

 

 

4) Leaders

 

NT added the concept of leaders to the BaM system.  Leaders are important because the allow the creation of corps, or groups of up to 8 units that can move and fight together.  If a corps loses a battle, it retreats and shatters, such that all attached units separate.  Since a leader can only reattach one unit per turn, this can often mean a corps is out of commission for at least several turns.  It also makes the corps vulnerable to follow up attacks that can mean it never really recovers (which is realistic and something I like about the game very much).

 

Reflecting the superior and unified French leadership, the French army can activate all their corps commands each turn, while the Allies are limited to five corps activations.

 

 

The best thing about Napoleon’s Triumph is that is imparts a terrific sense of maneuver.  When your opponent steals a march on you, and flanks one of your corps, you will both feel it.  He will feel exhilaration and you will feel anxious.  There is no praying to the dice-gods to get you out of your mistakes in the game.  There is, however, always the possibility that your opponent is bluffing you, and that eight unit corps is really a paper tiger, with a number of single strength units only demonstrating to your flank.

 

Which brings us to another great feature of NT; bluffing.  In most block games there is some element of bluff, and if anything, that sense is enhanced in NT due to the deterministic, non random nature of combat.  And what’s more, in NT is very much an all or nothing affair.  Whomever losing the battle, has their corps shattered, with every unit detached.  Thus, a single skirmish can mean the collapse of the center of your line, or that of your opponents.  Then is back to maneuver as you attempt to cobble together your line.

 

Another feature of NT is that while there is just a single battle to play, you can play the single day battle, where most of the corps start on the map, or the larger scenario where the games starts the day before the battle, and most corps start off map.  In the longer scenario, the element of maneuver is even more pronounced, as you have greater control over where to align you main axis of advance.  The playtimes, in my experience, run about three hours for the one day scenario and four hours for the longer scenario, though games can and often do end earlier when one side or the other breaks and loses immediately.  

 

While NT is a great game, and one of my new favorites, it is not without flaws.  The first of these is in the victory conditions themselves.  Like most games where the victory conditions are primarily driven by inflicting casualties on your opponent, it sometimes can come down to headhunting units, particularly near the end game when your opponent is about to reach their demoralization level (in NT, each step loss suffered by a unit in a losing battle reduces an army’s morale level by one – reach zero and is all over.)

 

 

 

Another problem for some is the scale of the game – its somewhere between operational and tactical in scale – call it grand tactical.  In other words, the game covers the battle in its entirety, which precludes such details as explicit cavalry charges, double shotted artillery, and infantry forming square.  The leaders, too, are completely generic, and if you choose you can have Murat leading the Imperial Guard.  Another slightly odd rule is that units in reserve in a location cannot reinforce units in the line that come under attack (if there was no unit in line, the reserve can step up and defend, but if there is already a unit in line defending, the reserve just sits there and watches).

 

Finally, as mentioned above, the combat is very procedural, which is quite awkward initially, but once you’ve gotten it down, its no problem to determine your odds of success for a certain attack.  The only uncertainty is in knowing if that infantry line you can see through the gunpowder haze is a single line or triple line backed up with cannon.

 

 

In summary, Napoleon’s Triumph is not without its flaws, but it is a brilliantly produced, unique, playable, and most importantly, very fun game that does a great job of recreating the sense of maneuver that is the primary reason for playing a Napoleonic game in the first place.  I highly recommend it (I rate it a 9 out of 10) and look forward to playing more myself.

 

 

Colossal arena is one unusual game. It's a Reiner Knizia design, so you have the elegance and accuracy of his games, but it's published by Fantasy Flight, which means lush art style and fantasy (or something else similarly geeky) theme. But here's the strange part: it makes sense! The theme feels natural to the game, and is quite entertaining to experience. And the gameplay, it's not an efficiency struggle for Vps, or anything like that. It's a gut-feeling luck-fest in which players try to guess the outcome of a fight they have little control in. A friend of mine even comented, while we played “are you sure Reiner Knizia made this game?”. It sure doesn't look like it.

 

In this game, player respresent magicians that influence a free-for-all battle between eight types of monsters in a Colosseum-like arena, while at the same time placing bets on the monsters they think will make it to the final podium. Any player can influence any monster, even the ones that he didn't bet on, but if he influences a monster in which he has the strongest bet (being that monster's “backer”), he gets to use a special power that helps him out, be it on the bets, on the fights or giving you extra cards so that you have more options to choose from.

 

Turn summary is dead simple, as is usual in knizia games. You can place a bet (you only have 5 bets to make during the entire game, so choose wisely), you then play a card, you check if the round is finished, then you draw cards until your hand is filled with 8 cards(if you have more, you draw nothing, but you lose nothing). You can play a card in any monster, but if you're that monster's backer, you get that monster's special ability to help you. A round ends when all the monsters have a card played to determine their strength (from 0 to 10) and there is one monster that is currently weaker than all the others. That monster is eliminated from the fight and another round begins.

 

 

The game ends when there's only 3 monsters left or the card pile has run out. Bets on the remaining monsters are worth Vps, bets on monsters that were eliminated are worth nothing. The earlier you bet on a monster, the more that bet is worth in the end, so you have to pick your horses early. You can place several bets on a single monster on the course of many rounds (but each monster can only take one bet per round, so there's a sort of worker-placement got-there-before-you element to it), but that can be quite risky.

 

This is definitely my favorite element of Colossal arena, which saves the game from being a random luckfest to being an interesting fight between conflicting and converging interests. If you place all your bets on a single monster, or if a certain monster has bets from only one player, the game becomes significantly more difficult. You have control of only 33%, 25% or 20% of the cards that are played during the game (in a 3 player, 4 player and 5 player match), so you sometimes you have to make alliances with the other players in order to keep your investments a little safer. If you keep trying to monopolize that troll, the other players will see that if he survives to the end you'll have an easy victory: it is best to let other players have a piece of that pie (troll pie?) as well.

 

The game design seems to encourage this kind of thinking, since the monsters' powers are far from being balanced. You could probably divide them into three different tiers: super strong, good and near-useless. So those good monsters will probably be snatched up quickly, and the one or two of the weaker ones will end up surviving due to the players trying to eliminate their opponent's investments. The game keeps things interesting by allowing players to place one secret bet on the first round, so there's an element of mystery (which you can sometimes deduce by their actions) that keeps the game from being predictable.

 

Still, it's undeniable that the luck factor in this game is high. You have a hand of eight cards, and if all of a sudden you don't get any more cards of the creature you placed the bet in the first round, your life is going to become difficult. If other players gang up on you, there's very little you can do to defend yourself.

 

 

Production values are nice. The art looks good and the information is presented in a very clear fashion. The game consists of a deck of cards and plastic chips to indicate the players' bets. I'm not a big fan of plastic, but to complain here would be kind of mean of me. The game even gives you four extra monsters, for more variety in your games. Since I don't play this game that often, and some monsters are definitely less interesting than others, I prefer to separate these extra 4 monsters from the others for a quicker setup.

 

This is a nice little card game, totally unpretentious and fun. There's some interesting thinking to be done during the match, and the special powers keeps things dynamic and quite alive. It's clearly a better experience with 3 players, even if the box says two to five. Five is too random, and two would probably be very lame. Matches usually take around 45 minutes and the age estimate of 8+ is accurate (if you're ok with your kids casting demons and trolls and gorgons... I know I'd be). It's acessible (easy rules) and quick, so it's definitely one of those quick fillers, and the new edition in a slimmer box looks even better than my large-boxed one. Overall, I give this game a 7/10, and play it when I'm in the mood for a quick cardgame with some violence in it.